music

So, it's been a week since I picked up my iPhone and it was right about this time 7 days ago when I received that first text and realized that, somehow, despite iTunes having all kinds of issues activating the phone, that I was now live. So, what's been the impression so far? Is it just a toy, or is it a productivity aid? While there are certainly some toy features, there have been a number of other things that move beyond the toy and into the realm of productive. For example:

SMS - I text a lot. For both my ministry and personal life, this is my most common method of communication. The iPhone, with the exception of pictures sent via text, is awesome, simply because it keeps a running conversation that I can easily scroll through ... which is especially nice if I happen to have some time where I can't text and then need to step back into a conversation.

email - Most of the email I get demands about 30 seconds of response time. With the iPhone, I can take any free moment here or there, and clear out the inbox, leaving only stuff that takes longer to deal with. This has greatly reduced my email time on my lap and desktops.

GPS - This feature rocks. Tell the iPhone to find where you are, tell it where you want to go, and it guides you step-by-step, even allowing you to watch yourself as you move on down the road.

Internet - It's not built for huge amounts of surfing, but when you need to find something quickly and in a setting where you don't have email, you can't beat having the whole web at your fingertips.

OmniFocus - My to-do list is always with me, ready to either add new items or check off old ones ... hard to beat the productivity of that.

On the not as productive but still very helpful front, here's a couple free apps:

Shazam - This is one of the coolest apps out there. If you like listening to the radio, but hate that you don't know who plays that song you love, Shazam is the answer. Just hold your iPhone up to the speakers, let it record a bit, and within seconds you'll have the artist, title, album, YouTube links, and connections to buy the song in iTunes. I tested it out on really old David Crowder and it didn't work, but it worked on just the intro for a song on the new album.

Pandora - The Pandora app rocks as it allows me to play a wide variety of commercial free music that's based on the musical style rather than any one particular artist. Very cool!

So, what's the next piece of life enhancing technology that I'm going to go for? I'm thinking this video that Anita sent provides the answer (assuming they develop a version that works for bottles):

Since my upcoming thoughts are rooted entirely in my theology of worship, I should start by providing some background on what I believe is going on in worship. Trying to keep it brief, when we gather as a community, we gather so God can act graciously and we can respond.

So, God acts by showing up, we respond. God acts by announcing forgiveness, we respond. God acts by speaking to us in his Word, we respond. God acts by giving us the body and blood, we respond. God acts by blessing us in the benediction (and hopefully we respond in our lives when we leave the church building).

Now, as I've planned various alternative worship of services with this general understanding of worship, I've always leaned towards having a single narrative that was aimed at telling this story of God's action and our response ... although, most of the time, that also demands a pre-story to point out why God has to act. So, when I plan, the music, the Scripture readings, the preaching, and everything else all weave together into a single story, so, when I saw this approach, I freaked a bit, because there is no way for the music to faithfully point into our out of the preaching portion of the worship narrative because they've been divided and the story is now broken up.

However, then I began to think about the traditional Lutheran liturgical setting where this pattern of acting and responding happens repeatedly, or, in the case of this unconventional idea, it could happen twice, once in preaching and once in music. What do you think, given my theology of worship, could that be a functional approach to something like this?